So What's My Book About?

My book, tentatively titled Mobius, is a sci-fi story about explorers heading off into space to seek answers to a great mystery. It takes place in a fictional universe, beginning on a planet much like our own. Humans have settled some of the planets, moons, and asteroids in their solar system, and have developed a thriving space economy.

Twelve years ago, Mobian astronomers discovered radio signals from a civilization of similar technological development on a planet around another star. To everyone’s astonishment, the people of this world—Tarran,* as they called it—were human! Now, the leaders of the two worlds are about to meet in a historic assembly in a space city above Mobius.

There are three viewpoint characters. Jaco, a spiritual trainee from a small island nation, travels into space with his mentor to attend the Interstellar Summit. However, calamity strikes, and Jaco finds himself stranded among the space colonies, cut off from his mentor and his home. Unable to attend the summit, he boards a ship heading out to search for the answer to how the two human planets could co-develop with no knowledge of one another.

Taea is a factory worker on Tarran who struggles with intense feelings of inadequacy. When her shift fails to meet its quota, she is reassigned . . . to space!

Salle is the Director of a Mobian corporation responsible for transporting goods between space colonies. While traveling to Tarran to forge an interstellar trade alliance, she gets caught up in a conspiracy to control the fate of the two worlds.

As shown in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we are merely infants in the cosmic cradle, able only now and then to catch glimpses of the majesty of existence. My goal in this book, and in writing science fiction in general, is to grab hold of these glimpses so that we can see reality through lenses beyond humanity, perceive powers beyond politics, and know, even while facing a cosmos unfathomably bigger than we understand, that we are a part of it and we are connected with it.

While the focus of my story is strongly on the characters, it is important to me to have a scaffolding of cohesive science and worldbuilding. This way, both the analytical brain and the emotional brain can enjoy the show together.

Though I love sci-fi, one problem I have with the genre is it tends to be too technical and spend too much time on exposition. I keep exposition to a minimum, giving us just what we need in order to follow along with the characters, and using techniques to make the presentation interesting. For instance, in my sample chapter, I could have broken the flow to explain the launch rail as a magnetic track that goes up to the top of the atmosphere, accelerating shuttles to orbital speed, an initially expensive but ultimately cost-saving and non-polluting alternative to rocket fuel. Instead, I had Jaco muse that it looks like a fish’s back fin, and feel excited that today he would get to ride up it to the edge of space for the first time. Some of the detail is lost, but we gain something more important: the way it relates to the character.

My influences include the three big Stars: Star Wars, Star Trek, and Stargate, novels like The Expanse, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, and Existence, the YouTube channel “Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur,” and an honorable mention to the video game, Outer Wilds. Each of these captures something I aim to synthesize in my book, from the worldbuilding to the character themes to the sense of peeking into the boundless frontiers of the cosmos.

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*I am considering changing the name of Tarran, because it sounds too much like Terran, which we all know as the sci-fi term for Earth people, and my book has absolutely nothing to do with Earth.